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India Sets World Record For New Covid Cases With 314,000 Infections (nbcnews.com) 140

India reported a global record of more than 314,000 new infections Thursday as a grim coronavirus surge hits the world's second-most populous country, sending more and more sick people into a fragile health care system critically short of hospital beds and oxygen. From a report: The 314,835 infections added in the past 24 hours raise India's total past 15.9 million cases since the pandemic began. It's the second-highest total in the world next to the United States. India has nearly 1.4 billion people. A large number of hospitals are reporting acute shortages of beds and medicine and are running on dangerously low levels of oxygen. The New Delhi High Court on Wednesday ordered the government to divert oxygen from industrial use to hospitals to save people's lives.

"You can't have people die because there is no oxygen. Beg, borrow or steal, it is a national emergency," the judges said responding to a petition by a New Delhi hospital seeking its intervention. The government is rushing oxygen tankers to replenish supplies to hospitals. India's Health Minister Harsh Vardhan said on Thursday that "demand and supply is being monitored round the clock." He said in a tweet that to address the exponential spike in demand, the government has increased the quota of oxygen for the worst-hit seven states. The surge has brought pain, fear and agony to many lives in New Delhi and other cities. In scenes familiar across the country, ambulances are seen rushing from one hospital to another, trying to find an empty bed. Grieving relatives are lining up outside crematoriums where the arrival of dead bodies has jumped several times.

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India Sets World Record For New Covid Cases With 314,000 Infections

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  • Not good (Score:5, Informative)

    by Nugoo ( 1794744 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:11PM (#61301318)
    Based on these graphs [worldometers.info], it looks like things are going to get a lot worse for India before they get better.
    • Re: (Score:1, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward

      "Worse" is a matter of definition. I mean if you consider that overpopulation is a problem in India, perhaps things might get better?

      • Re:Not good (Score:4, Funny)

        by DontBeAMoran ( 4843879 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:54PM (#61301452)

        I didn't know Thanos had a Slashdot account.

      • by ghoul ( 157158 )
        Population is only a problem if the people are not skilled. A skilled population is an asset. Witness Japan which is an island with few resources except a skilled population which can import raw material and export finished goods. If the pandemic was killing only unskilled people maybe your logic works but the pandemic is killing more in crowded cities where the skilled people are concentrated. The toll on doctors and nurses is particularly severe.
        • Population is only a problem if the people are not skilled.

          Even if everyone was skilled, overpopulation is a matter of finite land and finite resources on this planet.

          • by ghoul ( 157158 )
            The earth is really big. If you put the entire population of the earth in a city with the population density of New York City, the resulting city would be smaller than new York state with the rest of the world empty for farming.. We are not really running out of space to live in.
            • I'm pretty sure that given a choice, most people would not want to live in a city as dense as New York.

              • by ghoul ( 157158 )
                Given a choice Everyone would like to live in a city. Unfortunately not every profession can be done from a city so we have population spread out. Most of the people who panic about overpopulation live in a city and see the crowds everyday and not able to mentally realize how big and empty the world really is. Overpopulation is a fake news problem. Population numbers do not matter. For every mouth to feed there are two hands to work. If you train people and skill them every person produces more than they co
    • More infections means more mutations means more chances for the next mutation to get past our current vaccine defenses.

      This is why foreign policy matters. You fight it over there so you don't fight it over here.
    • Please spare me your fake sympathy, and anyone else posting here stupid enough to show concern on these number. India has over 700k child deaths a year simply from not having enough to eat, FOUR TIMES the number of people who’ve died from covid in a year and a half. Why are you sickos so much more concerned now that people over 80 and dying, but gave zero daily shits while kids under 5 were (and still are) dying much faster?

      From the beginning people haven’t been able to put covid statistics
      • by Nugoo ( 1794744 )

        What evidence do you have that my sympathy is insincere? What evidence do you have that I don't care about child malnutrition? I posted information about COVID on a story about COVID.

        Furthermore, the site I linked shows 2256 people in India died of COVID today. If this rate were to continue for a full year, it would surpass 700K, i.e. COVID was more deadly than childhood malnutrition today in India. This rate will not continue for a full year, however; it's on a sharp upwards trajectory. So, while prov

      • by dryeo ( 100693 )

        You do know that the new variants put young people in the hospital and without oxygen, they die. The 80 year olds dying was last year, before idiots decided to try to help it mutate. I'm in Canada, a 2 year old died from Covid the other day and the hospitals are full of 30-50 year olds now. Those 30-50 year olds are going to have a high mortality rate without medical care.
        In India, if your numbers are right, a lot of kids are going to be finished off by Covid as their malnutrition makes them vulnerable.
        The

  • by Thelasko ( 1196535 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @12:30PM (#61301382) Journal
    Every infection is another clock cycle in the search algorithm of evolution. The world will pay the price in new variants that are optimized to cause further chaos.
  • by HuskyDog ( 143220 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:28PM (#61301556) Homepage
    Yes, it is very sad that so many people in India are now dying of Covid, but India has a population of nearly 1.4 Billion!

    If we use the ever handy worldometers.info to check deaths per 1 million population for a few key countries we see the following rather less headline grabbing numbers.

    Hungary 2697
    UK 1868
    USA 1755
    India 134 (which puts India in 120th place on this measure)

    I agree that the death rate in India is rapidly increasing and clearly it is going to climb the charts, but I think it will be a very long time before it can compete on per capita deaths with leading countries like the UK and USA.

    • by ghoul ( 157158 )
      India has a young population. Also 60 % live in rural areas which makes it easier to socially distance. The second factor means even without lockdowns the rural areas are not severely affected. While the first factor means the death rate is low amongst those infected. In fact it could be argued the response to covid is killing more people via starvation than covid itself
      • by dryeo ( 100693 )

        Err, these new variants kill young people without medical attention (mostly oxygen). Besides the numbers from India are very suspect as likely they are not testing enough.

        • by ghoul ( 157158 )
          Not testing enough is a canard.

          Test positivity rate is what matters.
          Doesnt matter how many you test. How many as a percentage turn up positive gives you an idea of how prevalent the spread is.

          The numbers ARE bad. Test positivity is up to 30% in Delhi almost as bad as New York during the peak as compared to Test Positivity which was at 4-5% in February.

          Test positivity numbers are actually an upper bound on the actual spread as people get tested when they have symptoms or exposed to covid positive fol
          • by dryeo ( 100693 )

            While you make a good point, I was thinking more of different areas. An imaginary example would be if the Kashmir area had a lot of infections without any testing and an area with few cases had a lot of testing. It seems the number of negative tests would be higher then if the testing was more random.
            I have no idea how it actually works in India besides the knowledge that it is a big place with thin resources.

    • Not everything is properly reported in India.

      That and the reason it's a big country means that there's a higher numbers of mutations that can show up too.

  • by Somervillain ( 4719341 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @01:37PM (#61301596)
    One thing that confused me was how India's numbers were so low for so long. They're so densely populated and the poor don't have good access to healthcare and they have a lot of travel from ex-pats coming home. The images of their trains come to mind as an example of how to ensure any communicable diseases get spread rapidly.

    When COVID first hit, I thought..."uh, oh, India is really screwed"...but that really wasn't the case. They did better than the US and most of Europe for most of the pandemic

    I genuinely don't understand India's COVID situation. Can anyone explain why they did so well at first?...and what caused the recent spike? Every article I read talks about shortages of oxygen and a high toll, but I haven't yet found one that explained why. I am genuinely curious as to the scientific reason for each.
    • by avatar8008 ( 8011814 ) on Thursday April 22, 2021 @02:06PM (#61301726)
      Some scientists think India's first wave was less deadly due to the fact that general hygiene in India is far worse than the western world. This might explain why Indians' immune response is better. Also India went into a full national lockdown pretty early on in 2020. What is happening now is a culmination of different factors - there seems to be a Covid variant that has a double mutation and seems to be much more infectious which could explain the explosion in the infection rate. There are political leaders who seem to favour holding political rallies with hundreds of thousands of attendees - barely social distancing - over keeping Covid at bay. Once you get to a point where the medical infrastructure gets overwhelmed, then you have people dying who would have got better if they had had access to ventilators and oxygen.
    • by ceoyoyo ( 59147 )

      India has a young population. It's a country where 10% of people still die of tuberculosis, and 5% of diarrhea. India's per capita testing is also quite low compared to countries like the US, so you're not going to catch nearly as many of the less serious cases, and the young population means a smaller proportion of cases are going to be serious.

      The death rate in India currently is still only about half what it is in the US (and that's comparing a record peak for India and the lowest rate in the US since la

    • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

      India did have a massive spike and looked to overtake the U.S. at one point but then they suddenly managed to get COVID under control through severe lockdowns and their numbers dropped off while the U.S. was rapidly rising as it headed into Thanksgiving and Christmas and blew everyone else away with almost 250K new cases per day.

      India is not doing lockdowns this time around, so the natural result is a massive ballooning of cases because people are morons who like to gather and spread diseases to each other.

    • One thing that confused me was how India's numbers were so low for so long.

      India went through very strong lockdowns starting at the end of March last year, back when the USA and several other world leaders were telling people their 7 cases of "just the flu" would soon be zero cases. They took the virus seriously which is how they kept the numbers low for so long. There are parts of India which have literally been shutdown for 13 months now though restrictions are getting lax and lax, which you can correlate well with the rising numbers.

    • An epidemiologist quoted in https://www.npr.org/sections/g... [npr.org] says it was the result of a recent sudden reopening.

      The March 2020 and onward lockdown was a grim thing that cost lives but it kept infection rates on the first row of the chessboard.

      On top of that the nature of exponential growth is that it starts deceptively slowly.

    • Here are more scientists, with more points of view. There may be more than one cause, with increasingly infectious variants being a prime suspect.

      https://www.scientificamerican... [scientificamerican.com]

  • ...it's a shame they had to claim one such as this.

  • I keep hearing about so-called anti-vaxxers, but I have yet to meet anyone who is rabidly anti-vaccination. Instead, I hear things like:

    • There are moral problems with the way a certain vaccine was produced (used aborted fetal tissue, or cell lines derived there from). Which is not an objection to vaccination per se, but the particular methods use for some, but not all, of the vaccines.
    • I can't be vaccinated because the vaccine makers use known allergens (which is true - you can't get it if you're allerg
  • Total numbers really do not matter.
    Instead, it is far more important to know cases / 1M, and deaths / 1M [worldometers.info] Combined with current trends [worldometers.info]

    For example, the cases in last 7 days / 1M population and deaths in last 7 days/1M pop is pretty decent stat from trends.br
    • BTW, as I look through this, it is obvious that we really need to start sending western vaccines out to undeveloped nations.
      Look at the cases in last 7 days / 1M population.

      Basically, if you look at the % increases, the nations without vaccines, OR that are using CHinese vaccines [cgtn.com], are the ones still increasing.
  • by Subm ( 79417 )

    > more than 314,000 new infections

    With their technical schools, I'd expect 314,159.

  • And the worst part is Modi regime in India procured 66 million Covaxin/Covishield units at an inflated price and exported them;
    Criminal negligence; Modi should be in Jail, if Constitution permits;
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]

The 11 is for people with the pride of a 10 and the pocketbook of an 8. -- R.B. Greenberg [referring to PDPs?]

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